It’s (still) Okay To Laugh (and crying is still cool, too)

It has been 10 years since Nora’s first book, “It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool Too)” was published. A lot has changed since – she got remarried, had another child, and started this podcast to carve a space in the world for conversations that really matter. In honor of IOTL’s 10th birthday, today Nora is reading the two chapters out loud and live annotating – connecting with the person she was six months after her husband’s and father’s death, miscarrying a baby, and desperately trying to stay afloat.

 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

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  Hi.

Hi there. Hi. Hi.

Hey, Nora.

I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Thanks For Asking, a call-in show about what matters to you.

They say that you should write from your scars, not your wounds, but I had not heard that when I wrote my first book. What I had heard is that you should write what you know.

And in the winter of 2015, all I knew was that my husband had died, my dad had died, I had lost my second pregnancy, and I was 32 years old, and a solo mother to a toddler who would say things like, my dad is dead on the playground.

Before then, I had been the wife of Erin Purmort, who had been diagnosed with brain cancer a year into our relationship.

We married a month after his brain surgery, we had a baby via IUI 13 months after that, and we lived as though a three to five year life expectancy was a suggestion and not a certainty.

Prior to Erin’s diagnosis, the hardest thing that I had experienced was being a little girl with a bowl cut who was sometimes mistaken for Macaulay Culkin. And honestly, I kind of liked that. That wasn’t hard at all.

What was hard was being 5’10, 5’11, 6 tall by eighth grade, which made me six to eight inches taller than every boy that I knew.

Erin was not the first person I dated, not even the first person that I had fell in love with, but the first person who I dated, who considered me a writer. I met him when I was 27 years old.

I’d had quite a few relationships before then, but Erin was the first person that I dated, who saw me the way that I couldn’t even see myself.

I’d worked in marketing, PR, then in ad agency, and because my title was not writer, and because the personal essays that I wrote for $10 to $25 a pop online had very few readers, and my Tumblr even fewer, I didn’t think that I could consider myself

a writer. But Erin did. He loved my Tumblr. He loved my pointless and embarrassing essays like Our Leggings Pants.

Yeah, they are. And when he was diagnosed, I asked him if it was okay to write about him, about us, about his sickness. CaringBridge did exist, and no offense to it, I think it’s a wonderful tool, but it felt very bleak.

It felt like using CaringBridge was an admission that he was sick. So instead, I made a password-protected Tumblr, who was, I afraid, was going to read it.

So our friends and family could keep up with his life and with his treatment, but I didn’t really write about his treatment. It was boring to both of us, and who cared what his chemo was called anyways?

This was not a cancer story, this was a love story. At some point, I took the password off because nobody remembered it, and they’d text me every time they wanted to read the blog, besides, who was going to read it? Who didn’t know us?

When Aaron went on hospice, November 11th, 2014, he and I wrote his obituary together. I saved it in a folder called Just In Case, as though the evidence were not in front of us both.

On November 25th, 2014, I had to open the folder and submit that obituary to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, our hometown newspaper. It went viral, maybe because the first line is Purmort.

Aaron Joseph, age 35, died peacefully at home after complications from a radioactive spider bite, and a years long battle with a nefarious criminal named Cancer, who has plagued our society for far too long.

And if you are wondering, didn’t they fact check that obituary? No. It’s an ad for your funeral.

Write whatever you want to write. And so for that reason, we also included his first wife, Gwen Stefani. That obituary went viral.

Very, very viral. And that obituary led people to Google Aaron, and by default, they found my blog and they read it. And suddenly that blog that nobody read had quite a readership.

It was a top Tumblr of 2014, and I was hearing from agents and editors who said things like, hey, in a few years when the dust settles, you should think about writing a book.

I had by this point in my life read a lot of memoirs that were written years after the person had gotten through whatever they had gotten through. Memoirs that were transformative for me.

Memoirs that were written from a safe distance where meaning could be found from the experience and the memories. But I couldn’t imagine that future.

I didn’t want this loss to be shined up and alchemized into self-improvement or a life lesson or really anything. I didn’t want to have perspective. I had a perspective.

Even if your nose is right against the wall, even if you’re swept up in a hurricane, you have perspective. It’s not the clearest perspective, but it is a perspective. And even though I couldn’t sleep or eat, I could for some reason write.

It’s actually all I wanted to do. And so I insisted that actually the time to write a book was now. I insisted I was ready.

And within the six months after Aaron’s death, I had submitted the draft of my first book. It’s Okay To Laugh, Crying Is Cool Too. And that is a truly insane thing.

I don’t recommend it. I actually understand why people say to wait. I don’t think that the book that I published in 2016 is the book that I would write or publish today in 2026.

But that was, I must remind myself, the point.

I have not read this book since I wrapped up the tour in 2016, where I was also secretly pregnant and in love again and feeling immense and crushing guilt for the life I was living and the life I was growing, while also mourning the life and love

that I had lost. And I was at the same time working on the first episodes of what I thought would be a 10 episode podcast. And 10 years later, here you are, here we are.

People are still listening to the podcast the same way they are still reading this first book, which is still in print. And today, I’m cracking open this book for the first time, like a time capsule from my former self to see what I think.

This is real. This is in the moment. I do not know what will happen when I open this book, but remember, it’s okay to laugh.

Crying is cool too. This is the paperback. I wonder if I should grab the hardcover.

I don’t even know if I have a hardcover anymore, so I probably have one somewhere, but we’re going to stick with the paperback. It’s a little bit dusty. First of all, I just want to say, the title was not my first choice.

I liked a lot of titles more. One was A Light That Never Goes Out, which is a Smiths reference. Yeah, because I love that song, and I remember thinking when Aaron was diagnosed, like, yeah, to die by your side, the pleasure, the privilege is mine.

I would hope, honestly, that a double-decker bus would kill the both of us. I also liked this a little more obscure, but And The Moon Went With Him, which is a line from Harold and the Purple Cran. I can’t explain it, I just really liked that one.

All the cliches are true because they just sometimes are, and it feels sometimes when you’re writing about life and love and loss especially, like you’re like, wow, everything is just such a cliche.

And then you realize that’s because these things happen. They feel real. This is not a sad love story.

That was one of my favorites. And then I was told it was too close to like another book title, I don’t know. It’s also not the first version of the book I wrote.

I do have that version somewhere that I submitted, which was very linear. It was very more straightforward memoir. I will find that one.

I’m almost like a little afraid to revisit it because I, that one was rejected. That one was rejected by the publisher. And I was told like, I go back to the drawing board, baby, go back to the drawing board.

But something that I remember was, you know, sending that first version to my editor and her saying, you know, you don’t have to write this like a sad story. Didn’t you say this was a love story? So, ooh boy, all right.

Here we go. Also, so this was written in 2015. And even just the first line of the introduction, I do remember a conversation within publishing, which said, you’re going to have to justify why you get to write this book.

And honestly, looking back, I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if I needed to justify it or apologize for it. But the implication was that as a 30-year-old, 31, 30, I think I wrote this when I was freshly 32, that I would need to explain.

Like, because it was, I obviously was coming from, I don’t know. Like, I would have to explain why I could and should write this book. And you’ll hear that right in the first sentence that I just glanced at.

Okay. You are holding a book by another youngish white woman who had a pretty charmed life until her father and husband died of cancer a few weeks after she miscarried her second baby. That’s just the truth.

2014 sucked pretty hard, but for most of my life, things were easy. I have three siblings, and we are all currently on speaking terms. I was voted most likely to have a talk show in high school.

My parents mostly loved and respected each other, even if my dad referred to my beautiful thin mother as Large Marge. My grandparents died when they were old, so I was sad, but okay with it.

I got to go to private school from kindergarten to college, and I don’t even have student loans to pay off. Seriously, how much do you hate me right now?

But as easy as things were, I was always certain that I was somehow wasting time, that everything was slipping through my fingers, and I was never going to do anything with my one wild and precious life.

I kept waiting for someone else to tell me how to do it. It seemed like everyone else always knew what they were doing, but how? How did they know who to marry and how to get a car loan?

How did they know what number to put for their tax deduction that their parents wouldn’t end up paying their income taxes during their first year of adulthood? Where was the life syllabus and how did I miss it?

Side note, I’m going to be annotating this as I go when I want to. I also have to note on the very back, there’s an error. There are several errors in this book that I remember, but this one I forgot about.

The beginning of my bio says Nora McInerny was voted most humorous by the Annunciation Catholic School class of 1997. I graduated grade school in 1996.

So let’s just correct that right there for people who thought, you know, I was trying to lie about my age. No, no, no, class of 96, graduated eighth grade in 96, okay? Also, I did not know how to get a car loan.

When I went to go buy my first car right before I met Erin, I walked under the Honda dealership and I said, I can’t buy a car today because I do not have $20,000. It’s going to take me a while to get that kind of money.

And they said, have you not heard of financing? I said, what are we talking about? I left with a Honda Accord that day.

Now I’m a 32 year old widowed mom and I don’t have time to worry about whether or not I’m doing it right because I know that my one wild and precious life is indeed slipping through my hands.

If I want to do something big and important, I have to do it before 5 o’clock because daycare is strict about pickup time.

I’m not so worried anymore because now I know nobody knows what they are doing in life and nobody knows what to do when bad things happen to themselves or other people.

We make it up as we go and sometimes we are big and generous and sometimes we are small and petty. We say the wrong things, we obsess over all the ways we got it wrong and all the ways that other people did too.

The only thing I know for sure is that it is okay not to know everything, to try and to fail and to sometimes suck at life as long as you try to get better. I’m not writing this book to bum you out although parts of it are for sure a bummer.

I’m thinking specifically about the parts where my dad dies or my husband dies or I miscarry a baby. I don’t need your pity, I have plenty of my own and I spend it creating sad stories about old men I see alone at the bus stop.

I like that, I still do that. I’m writing it because bad stuff is like good stuff, it just happens. People really expect that huge life events will make you older and wiser, and in some ways they do.

I now have a will. I don’t give all the fucks about what people say about me on the Internet and in some ways I came out of life events like any other person.

A little irritated at how many people complain about cold and flu season like they were just diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer, and a little preoccupied with how flat my butt looks since I had a child. Still, and I’m still working on it.

I’m writing a book about it, the good stuff and the terrible stuff, because I know I’m not special. This stuff happens to everyone. I’m not an expert on grief or parenting or even writing.

Maybe I googled how to write a book, maybe not, who’s to say? I did, I did google how to write a book. In many pits, like just pits of despair, I was like, writing a book, how do you do it?

Someone helped me how to write a book. I took like weird webinars that were definitely scams written by people who I don’t even think had written a book. Like it was bad.

Okay. I’m just another dummy with a blog and a collection of most improved awards from her days as a mediocre high school athlete, trying every day to get better at life.

Not every life lesson comes from death or tragedy, sometimes it comes from flipping off your high school principal because he was illegally driving in the carpool lane. And you know what? I did apologize for that.

I mean, I apologized for it when it happened. I also apologized at my high school reunion, but I maintained that. He did that.

This is for people who have been through some shit or watched someone go through it. This is for people who aren’t sure if they’re saying or doing the right thing. You’re not.

Nobody is. This is for people who had their life turned upside down and just learned to live that way. For people who have laughed at a funeral or cried in a grocery store.

This is for everyone who wondered what exactly they’re supposed to be doing with their one wild and precious life. I don’t actually have the answer, but if you find out, will you text me? Okay.

I was afraid to read this, and I know that I will find parts that don’t fit, but that still does feel like me. I feel like I might have written exactly that even today.

Chapter one. Lay off me, Mary. Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

I don’t know, Mary. I’m not great at planning. Can’t I just go with the flow?

Honestly, this quote stresses me out sometimes. It’s like YOLO for women with Pinterest. This is a reference that I believe dates the book.

I don’t know if we’re still using Pinterest. I’m not because it’s mostly ads and AI at this point. I do still love to dabble in Pinterest.

I miss the heyday of Pinterest. I didn’t know how good it was until it was gone. I do know that younger people are really loving Pinterest though.

My daughter uses it, Ralph uses it. My life is wild and precious. I only have one.

What am I going to do with it? Well, for starters, I’m going to do so many things I never wanted to do. I’m going to play sports I don’t like just because I’m tall.

Even as a grown up, years after my last game, I will say, yep, when old men ask if I play basketball, just because I don’t want to disappoint them.

Okay, this is true, and I still do this, and sometimes I tell old men that I play for the WNBA because I know they don’t watch it, and I know they’re not going to fact check it, and they want a brush with celebrities, so I give it to them.

I say, yeah, I play for the Phoenix Mercury. And you know what they say? They say, wow, that’s great.

I’m 43. I don’t think there’s anyone in the WNBA who’s 43. I could be wrong.

I could be wrong. I also, I’m just, if you ask me, do I play basketball? And I think I can get away with a little white lie and tell you I play in the WNBA.

I will tell you I do, okay? And I shouldn’t be saying this publicly because now that just took away one of my small joys, I’m going to be mean just to fit in. Sadly, yes, I did that as a kid.

I did that as an adolescent. I probably, I’ve done it a little bit as an adult. I hate it.

I’m going to tip waitresses 20% even when they’re mean to me. Honestly, sometimes even more. Sometimes to prove a point, if a waitress is mean to me, a server, they could be any gender.

If a server’s mean to me, I’ll be like, now I’m tipping you 50%. You’re going to feel bad about this later. And so will I, and I’ll have less money.

I’m going to live with a thin little skin where I let every insult wound me and every compliment slide right off my back. I think I’m doing this wrong. I’ll be stressed to the max, Mary, even when I’m a kid.

I’m going to be certain that every paper I write will be the one that determines my future. In the summertime, I will go to Lake Superior with my brother and my cousins. I’ll float in the icy water and imagine I’m a tiny pebble.

I’ll swim until my lips are blue. I’ll play the saxophone for a whole year and nobody in my family will remember. This will annoy me because who lies about playing the saxophone?

And by the way, I did play the saxophone. I tried to provide evidence, which was a reed from a saxophone that I taped in a journal. My family said, she could have gotten that from anywhere.

Who lies about playing the saxophone? I took lessons from Pete Brophy of Minneapolis. He’s out there.

He can verify. I’m sure he still has his records. Okay, I played the saxophone.

Not well. And why did I play the saxophone? Because Lisa Simpson played the saxophone.

I will forgive my uncle when he calls me, a seven-year-old, impersonates Goofy and tells me I’ve won a trip to Disneyland. I do regret putting this in the book because that really upset me. My uncle was really sad that he hurt my feelings.

He was just a jokester. He thought I would understand, but it was a good Goofy impression of what seven-year-old doesn’t want to go to Disneyland. He’s still like, about that.

I will go to Disneyland as an adult. My husband and I will watch the haggard couples screaming at each other over their strollers. We’ll hold the sweaty little hands of our niece and nephew and purchase overpriced souvenir ears and limp salads.

That night in the dark of our hotel room, we will decide to have a baby together. Cancer be damned, whatever it takes. That is what happened, but another error, we went to Disney World.

I didn’t know there was a difference between the two. Erin did. Yeah, we went to Disney World.

And honestly, because of Josie and Gabe, we did want to have a baby, even though I was looking at all these kids screaming and I was like, I want to be in hell like all these other parents. Come on, I don’t want to miss out on this.

I will say the F word even after I’m sent to my room for my little brother breaks my tailbone in a wrestling match for the remote control when we are both in high school.

In my brother’s defense, I was so much bigger than him and I was like holding him down and punching him when I took the remote. It was retribution.

One day, while I’m changing his diaper, my two year old son Ralph will smile, look me right in the eye and say, oh fuck, and I will laugh. And now by the way, in my household, we have, you can unlock swear words at certain ages. It’s not two.

It’s damn at 10. What is it? No, it’s damn at 13.

Oh, I forgot them. Ooh, I forgot them. I think it’s, I already forgot them.

But I know it’s shit. I think it’s damn at 13. Damn at 13.

Shit at 16. F word at 18 and B word never unless you’re a girl or gay. So those are our rules.

Okay. I’m going to make sure I spend most of my college experience stumbling drunk through the streets of Cincinnati. Check.

Or better yet, being pushed around in a stolen grocery cart. I will know I’m wasting this opportunity, so I will try to keep that feeling quiet. I’ll try to starve it away or push it down with hours in the gym.

I will let my jeans slide on and off without unbuttoning them. I will count my ribs with my fingers at night.

I will spend years mimicking the fashion stylings of Britney Spears, pierced belly button with a hot pink jewel, tanning bed tan and chunky highlights.

When she and Justin Timberlake break up, I will cry in my dorm room and wonder if love is even real. And you know what we didn’t know? At the time, we didn’t know the truth.

And now we’ve read Britney’s memoir, and we feel a little bit differently about this. I will listen to a friend tell me about having sex in the basement of a party with a senior.

When I repeat this story to my boyfriend, who is halfway across the country at a small liberal arts college where he takes women’s studies and plays football, he will say, that’s not sex, that’s rape.

And I will know he is right, but not what to do about it. And since this book was written, I’ve had conversations with that friend and with another friend.

And we have all grown to understood that many of the things that happened to us in college were not the funny stories that we told them as, and they were wrong, and that the boys who did those things are now dads, live in their lives somewhere.

And I hope that it haunts them the way that it has haunted so many of us. And I have a feeling it doesn’t. I have a feeling it doesn’t.

A very important thing to do with your wild and precious life is to get a job, so I will do that. I’ll sit in a cubicle, I suppose, and then another cubicle. I’d always imagined a really stately office with lots of books.

Look at me now. Ikea bookshelves are just as valid as any other kind. But this little beige pen will do just fine.

It comes with a wastebasket and a little sorter thing for my folders, which I will never use because that’s what a computer does now.

I’ll make a lot of PowerPoint documents about very important strategies for things like how a consumer can connect with the fossil fuels brand on Twitter because you know what? That’s all people want to do these days.

They’re just opening up Twitter hoping to start a dialogue with the guys who put gas in their SUVs and I can say I helped that happen. Mary, isn’t that something?

I will sometimes hate read blogs written by people I despise just to make my blood boil.

You probably don’t hate read anything because you have a sparkling mind, that has not been pecked to death by the incessant information assault that is the internet. But seriously, Mary, how many lifestyle blogs does the world need?

How many photos of coffee? How many hashtags do we need on one photo? And can’t we have a brunch without labeling all the brev-

the brev-ligis? All the beverages with small chalk signs, Mary? Can’t we?

Sometimes I’ll read Twitter right when I wake up. When only one of my eyes opens fully, I will follow hashtags that make me want to punch someone. I’m talking about you, not all men, men-a-nism and all lives matter.

I will fall in love quickly the first time and slower every time after that. I hope we are in love forever. I will write my bubbly high school girl handwriting.

I will say I love you when I don’t exactly mean it, but I love you sounds better than you are my best option at the time, though I know you have reached your full potential and I’m destined for greater things, buddy. That’s okay, right?

I will choose the wrong man sometimes. All right, most of the time. Okay, every time except once or twice.

I will sometimes miss these men who were not right for me. I will think of them when I hear certain songs by long lost indie bands or smell marijuana in the summertime. I will always say it wasn’t love, but it was.

Love is not always perfect, is it, Mary? Isn’t it sometimes awkward and bumbling? I will move to New York for love.

I won’t have a job or any money, but it will feel very alive and very special and cosmopolitan, even though date night sometimes means eating at Olive Garden in Times Square because I’m dating a man who is comfortable enough to admit that his

favorite kind of Italian food is Italian food. That’s funny. Good job, Nora. I will learn the words to misogynistic rap songs, even though I’m a feminist, I will always turn it down when my car rolls up beside an elderly person.

Sometimes I will be small and mean and ugly and jealous. Sometimes I’ll be open and loving and generous. I’ll do anything to avoid being lonely.

I’ll wake up in beds where I do not belong, grab my things and go. I will pick my nose and hope nobody is looking. I do that still.

I’m sorry, I just hate the feeling a booger is in my nose. I will judge other people and find myself doing nearly all those things I judged them for.

C, my giant all-terrain stroller, handing my child an iPhone to keep him quiet when we’re out to dinner and he’s losing his mind, co-sleeping with him until he is 30 fingers crossed. But you know what, I stand by all those things.

I stand by all those things and there’s no parent more perfect than one who has not had children yet. I will choose the right man when it really matters. I will tell him once that it is my dream to be on the Kiss Cam.

And at every sporting event, he will conspire to make sure we make out hardcore every time the Jumbotron camera passes us by. By the way, this happened every time I went to a sporting event. It truly did.

We were always on the Jumbotron. And it was never the Kiss Cam, but I made it the Kiss Cam. I will watch him die in my arms.

I’m not saying that to be dramatic. I’m saying it because aside from pushing a live baby out of my hidey hole, it is the most meaningful thing I have done with this wild and precious life.

I will tell our son that his papa is in his heart and in mine. Like the word fuck, Ralph will remember that. He will remind me on gray spring days when I’m wiping his lunch from the floor where he’s been so kind as to sprinkle it.

My papa loves you, he’ll say to me, with his crooked teeth grin, he’s in my heart. I’ll be quick to forget everything good I’ve ever done. I’ll replay every time I’ve ever been an asshole and hate myself for every wrong thing I’ve ever said and done.

Yes, it stressed me out to be asked about my plans for my one wild and precious life. But I will still like this phrase every time someone has turned it into art on Pinterest or Instagram. I will try not to let it stress me out.

I will try to be better. I will try to bring more love to the world. That chapter, all I feel is all of my survivors’ guilts.

All of my survivors’ guilts right there, coming through that one. And just feeling in the wake of grief, like if anybody deserved to be alive, it was Erin and not me. And what a fun feeling that was.

Chapter two. Now. I don’t want to have cancer, he whispers.

We’re curled up in his hospital bed, trying to go to sleep in the alternate universe we found ourselves in. When we woke up this morning, we were just a regular young couple, secretly cohabitating after a year of dating.

Secretly, because I couldn’t let my parents know I was living with a man. Okay? I just, I was like, where do I live?

Where do any of us live, baby? What’s my address? I’ll tell you about my address.

I live on planet Earth, and really, you’re my home, mom. But somewhere in the middle of the day, he had had a seizure, ended up in the hospital, and found out he’d somehow grown a brain tumor without even noticing.

You don’t have cancer, I tell him, because he doesn’t. He has a tumor, and until they open his head to take it out, that tumor could be anything. A conjoined twin absorbed into his skull at birth, a silver dollar, a handful of cotton candy.

But it’s not cancer, because I won’t let it be, and in my 28 years on this earth, I’ve become goddamn used to getting whatever the hell I want.

My first boyfriend, who I just, one thing about me, I would say most relationships, no one liked me right away except Erin, otherwise I was just around. I would wear you down by just being present.

No one except Erin and I guess both my husbands, okay? No one except both my husbands were immediately love struck by me. Everyone else, I was simply there for so long that they ended up relenting.

Yikes. My first boyfriend in A when I deserved to B in American history, junior year of high school. I’m so sorry.

I apologize. I apologize to that teacher. Marty Maron.

I apologize. I was so annoying. I was the most annoying student.

And Brad Casey. Okay. I was an annoying, annoying kid.

I was a grade grubber. God. My first job, the dimple in my right cheek.

Look at it. It’s not even really a dimple, but I kind of willed that in to exist. It didn’t exist until I wanted it to.

That’s just a sampling of the things I’ve gotten through sheer willpower. Whatever the nurse gave Aaron a few minutes ago is starting to work, and I can feel his body gently relax next to me.

I’d asked if I could have a sleeping aid too, but Nurse Neal just laughed and dropped his signature line, I know, right? I loved this guy. He was like young, and he did everything we said.

He’s, I know, right? He was so chill. So I’m left wide awake in the glow of my boyfriend’s heart monitor.

I keep my hand on his head and my head on his heart, and in the glow of our new nightlife, and in the glow of our new nightlight, I command the universe to keep going my way.

And then I’m standing by his grave, having traveled at light speed from the present to the worst case scenario. The priest is swinging incense over Aaron’s body. I’m kneeling next to his mother in a church pew.

I’m throwing a handful of damp earth onto his casket, shiny as a Cadillac. We’re young and in love, and my boyfriend is going to die. He will die, I know it, and I go there, though I have no business doing so.

Our human imaginations are woefully unprepared for predicting actual pain, but I hack away at it anyway, trying to form a scar before I’m even wounded. November has always been the cruelest month.

November is gray and stark, each day growing shorter and shorter until December can plunge us into total darkness.

November took my uncle and my grandmother, and many years after we’ve laid them each to rest, when the sting of this month has become more of a dull ache, November is trying to claim Erin.

As a child, I was always worried that my parents would die if I slept away from our home because I was a very normal and happy child with no anxiety issues at all. I see so many TikToks that are like me at a sleepover.

I have to go home now because I remembered my mom exists, and that was me.

Sleepovers were rare because my father was strict and old-fashioned and believed that a child belonged in her bed and not on the floor of some half-finished Minneapolis basement watching PG-13 movies and getting made fun of for her headgear, but they

did happen. And I’d always spend the night racked with insomnia, imagining the demise of my parents and my impending orphanhood.

One by one, my friends would drift off to sleep and I would lay awake among them, imagining my older sister delivering the news when I walked into our home the next day with my sleeping bag under my arm and calling out to our family, yoo-hoo, in

imitation of our now dead mother. I pictured my siblings and myself lined up in the front row of the church, kneeling before our parents’ coffins and coordinating all black outfits. My brothers would offer me their handkerchiefs to dry my tears.

My brothers would apparently have handkerchiefs. There would be a custody battle, of course. We’d all be split amongst our godparents.

That’s what godparents do, right? Take over when your parents die in a sleepover-related accident. That would be the end of our family, all because I needed to sleep at Catherine’s house and chat on AIM with strangers.

My parents never did die or my dad did, but later and of cancer, and it wasn’t my fault I wasn’t at a sleepover.

But I replayed these scenes all the time throughout my childhood, a way of trying on feelings and situations that didn’t fit yet, that wouldn’t fit for years to come. But this is different. This is fucking wrong.

I understand now why someone emailed me after this book came out and said that she returned my book because of all this work. She returned it to the library. But still, it’s like I don’t need all the Fs.

I don’t think they really add that much to it.

It is wrong to try on this fictitious sorrow for size when Erin is sleeping beside me, and I drag myself from this imaginary hell into the real and present one in front of me, sneaking out of our hospital bed to wash my hot, tear-soaked face with

cool water and look into my own tired eyes in the tiny beige-tiled fluorescent-lit en-suite bathroom in his hospital room. There are two tiny soaps that you know will instantly turn your skin to sandpaper, plain toothbrushes with bristles so weak,

it’s like brushing your teeth with baby hair. Also, the plastic of the handle was so weak. It was like the whole thing was just malleable. And a small bottle of lotion that smells like gasoline.

If you had a really excellent imagination and a really bad sense of what a hotel experience should be like, you could almost pretend you were at a cheap motel, even though those don’t have ball chain cords next to the toilet to pull in case of

emergency. As time went on, we would sometimes accidentally call the hospital the hotel. Aaron was where I’d left him, sleeping on his side in a hospital bed built for one, leaving space for me. You cannot do that again.

I tell myself, you cannot bury the man you love while he is still alive. So I didn’t. I fought the urge to try to feel things before they happened and instead tried to feel what was actually happening.

I think this is called being present or living your life, but it was a really new concept for me and it blew my mind in the same way, discovering that Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast is voiced by Jerry Orbach from Law and Order, or that Drake was

Jimmy on Degrassi. Aaron had brain surgery and got discharged from the hospital and we went to Target as his customary. He was diagnosed with brain cancer and we decided to get married, like immediately, cancer be damned.

We didn’t spend time reading about brain tumors or bothering with statistics because it, again, too many Fs. We had several HBO series to watch and that didn’t leave a lot of time for worrying.

We got so good at being alive in the moment that I think a lot of people in our lives forgot Aaron was sick. And actually, I think we sometimes forgot Aaron was sick, and that an incurable cancer meant an impossible future. But who needed the future?

Until we’d have to wake up at 6 a.m. for an MRI or go see his oncologist, we were just a regular young couple who had more chemo than food in their cupboards, and were on a first name basis with the radiation staff.

A day before our wedding, I had one small word tattooed in cursive inside my right wrist. It was my something new for our wedding day and a reminder to myself that nothing good ever came of time traveling.

It’s just one tiny word that helped me do the biggest things in life, like getting married and buying a house and having a baby or getting my ears pierced at 32.

Which by the way, I had to get them re-pierced 10 years later because I just, I don’t really like earrings. They kind of freak me out. I look at it every day to remind myself what time it is now.

And that’s my tattoo, which I didn’t, I didn’t think about the place. I’d never worn a watch really. So it’s kind of covered by a watch most of the time.

It’s real thick. It’s faded. I knew it would.

I knew it would. And now Sophie has that same tattoo in the same place. I mean, hers is different.

She had a different artist draw it, but same artist, Chelsea Brink drew it, but just in a different way. This only happened like a year ago, so I really should just fully know the origin of this tattoo.

But okay, that was not as hard as I thought it would be. I’m not as embarrassed as I thought I would be. By that, I really thought that was going to be just hell for some reason.

I thought that was going to be very, very difficult for me to get through, and that I would be cringing the entire time. I am going to keep doing this. I am going to keep doing this.

I don’t know if I will do the entire book. I do think it’s good to leave people wanting more.

This is still an audio book that is out in publication, so I don’t think I can read the entire thing on a podcast, but I might do a couple more for subscribers in the clubhouse. By that, I mean just behind the paywall.

I think there are some chapters that I feel differently about that I will get into. I will get into those. All right, so those are, that’s the introduction, the first two chapters to It’s Okay to Laugh, Crying is Cool 2.

I really thought that was going to be more cringy, more embarrassing, and that would feel much less like me, but I know that there are elements of this book that I definitely, definitely, definitely would feel differently about.

When I look through the table of contents, I can identify them. I can identify them. Kind of wild, there’s 46 chapters.

There are 46 chapters to this book. 46 chapters. I do still kind of wish that I would have told it chronologically, at least some of it.

I really do, I do have to let that go because I have what I have, and this book has done its job, and it has offered a lot of comfort to a lot of people, and hindsight is always very, very different.

You get what you get, you do what you do, you live at the speed of life, I firmly believe that. I’m going to keep, I’m going to do another installation of this.

It might just be for subscribers because this is still a book that is in publication, this is still an audio book that is out there.

I don’t need it all out there eating into my zero profits from those book and audio sales, but you never know, you never know something could really, this could really hit the mainstream 10 years later. But I doubt it.

I know somewhere in here, somewhere in here, there is a reference to Donald Trump rallies, which I thought was going to be a funny joke that we never thought about again.

I thought, wow, that’ll be a weird thing that happened once in Minneapolis, and that people probably won’t even understand that reference in 10 years. Instead, they don’t understand that reference because it happened.

So I think that what I thought was going to be a lighthearted joke is now like, oh, yikes, weird. But anyways, thank you for going down that little bit of memory lane with me.

Ten years, a lot has changed in the 10 years that I’ve written that book, as a lot of you know. And yeah, we will revisit it, we will revisit it soon. Bonus episodes probably for subscribers.

I’m Nora McInerny. This is Thanks For Asking. It is okay to laugh.

Crying is still cool. And there are things that I read in there that really do still feel like me. I think those versions of ourself are still in there somewhere.

Like that wisdom that we had at one point in time that we thought we lost track of, it is still in there and some of it has actually gotten better, has gotten sharper. We know more now.

Honestly, sometimes I look back and I’m like, I think I knew more. I think I knew more before. I think sometimes I just have gotten dumber year after year.

I’ve never done an episode like this, but there is something about hitting 10 years. I’m about to have 10 years of this podcast. It does have me feeling just reflective, sentimental.

This is an independent podcast, so you being here, sharing it. Every like, share, rating, review, every call, every text, we do love your feedback. We love getting topics from you.

We love knowing what is on your mind. 612-568-4441 or thanks at feelingsand.co. Both are in the episode description.

You don’t have to memorize them. Our theme music is by Geoffrey Lamar Wilson. Our closing theme music is by My Youngest Son, Q.

This episode was produced by Marcel Malekibu. It was read and performed by me, Nora McInerny. There are several ways to get bonus episodes.

One is over on Apple Podcasts. The other is on Substack, where there’s plenty for free on both places. There always will be.

I know times are very hard. Substack is mostly free, but you can get bonus episodes over there. Same with Apple.

But on Substack, you can also sign up to be a supporting producer to sign up and get your name in the credit.

This is the part where I get to thank all of our supporting producers, like Rachel Annalise Charney, Augie Book, Joy Heising, No Name, Nancy Duff, Jenny Medellin, Kathleen Langerman, Jordan Jones, Ben, Jess, Beth Derry, Sarah Garifo, Cathy Sigmund,

Sarah David, Mary Beth Berry, Sheila, Krystal, Kaylee Sakai, Virginia Labassi, Lizzie DeVries, Rachel Walton, David Binkley, Lisa Piven, Michelle Toms, Nicole Petey, Melody Swinford, Caroline Moss, my best friend, Michelle Oh, Andra Brzezinski,

Amanda, Jess Blackwell, Abia Rose, Krystal Mann, Bonnie Robinson, Lauren Hanna, Jacqueline Ryder, Patrick Irvine, Shannon Dominguez-Stevens, Cathy Hamm, Penny Pesta, Erin John, Mad, Christina, Emily Ferriso, Elizabeth Berkley, Kiara, Monica, Alyssa

Robison, Kaylee, Kate Byerjohn, Courtney McCown, Jeremy Essin, Lindsay Lund, Jessica Letexier, Lexi-Laine Watkins, Jill MacDonald, Alex Gautieri, Robin Roulard, Dave Gilmore, Laura Savoy, Grace Allendorf, Chelsea Siernik, Kelly Conrad, Jen Grimlin

and Micah. Thank you guys so much. We’ll see you again here next week.